My first idea is a time-traveling hour-glass and the second is a set of scales that converts any object placed on it to an item of a similar nature. Eg an ax would yield a tree, a hunting rifle would yield a stuffed and mounted animal head. Ect. I've already come up with names for them but I need to know how to make them interesting and worth adding to the list.

I can't remember its clever nickname, but the hourglass is pulled straight from Harry Potter. That is a big no-no. As far as the second item is concerned, (and I'm going to make the forums seem like a broken record right now, but it's true) you need to have a story. We don't want a thing what does a thing, we want to read a story about a thing what does a thing, cleverly disguised as a government document. I honestly don't see the scale having an interesting story to tell, but if you could prove me wrong, that would be awesome. Just my opinions, though.

The second item is basically what 914 does on 1:1 setting.
As for the first, time travel of any sort is a genuinely tricky topic to write about sensibly, and also one that's been pretty done to death in fiction. I doubt that it's the way a breakthrough is coming from. And yeah ,seconding the Harry Potter thing. I remember those from book 3.

Wait, seriously, the hourglass was in a harry potter book? Guess I'll find another thing to make it work, and as for the scale, eh, figured as much. Though it kinda seemed like a more erratic and harder to use. Regardless, thanks for the feedback. I do have one other thing though. A writer who's books become reality but only in a way that affects him. And I do have a story for that but I need a name.

The first item is essentially the Time-Turner from Harry Potter. The second item sounds a lot like SCP-914, which has been around for a while.

Both have the issue of being generic magic objects, which essentially are "things that do a thing". The reader needs to be given more of a reason to care about what you're writing about besides "apparently it does this".

Some aspects people like to add into the SCP to give the reader more to think about include answers to questions like
- did this object ever have a greater significance before it was contained?
- was it ever special to someone?
- how was it initially discovered by the person who first owned it?
- why does it exist? Does it have a purpose?
- what might the intentions of the creator have been?
- how does it interact with others? Is it meant to do so that way?

What if the scales are called the "Scales of Justice," and they somehow reflect the inner worth of what you put on them. In the case of people, they would show you the number of lives a person has saved/taken. I don't imagine those people actually APPEAR on the scale - maybe representations of them. In the case of objects, a favorite CD conjures up a happy memory associated with it. So the person who puts the things on the scale makes a difference. If a generic researcher puts a stuffed animal on the scale, you get $2. If a small child puts the same thing on the scale, you get… um, whatever represents an overwhelming feeling of peace and love. The trick here (one of the tricks) is that the device takes in a "symbol" and outputs another "symbol." It's a poetic device.

What if instead of conjuring up other objects or images, it "weighs" the object you place on it for things like:
Joy
Misery
Necessity
Sanctity
Love

Etc. Some series of parameters to gage something's impact on the world. So a regular Bic pen weighs very little on everything. The pen that was OWNED BY HITLER weighs 8 million misery units, because of all the things it signed.

I don't think Hitler would have owned a Bic pen - they were really commercially successful '45 on.
That said… I don't know. This might be a workable concept, maybe, but like, you haven't given us any hook yet. ( As a completely silly thing I'm pondering it being a Factory product, marketed to identify useless/unimportant items around you, but eh, I'm not sure about it at all.)

Good joke SCP: Hitler's bic pen. It makes whatever you write evil. You start writing a love letter, it makes you write a breakup letter. You start writing a grocery list, it becomes a list of ingredients to make a homemade bomb. We could probably even interview it via written responses, right?

Sounds like a combination of the aforementioned SCP-914 and SCP-1144, the latter in particular.

I'm also unsure about how the researchers would figure out how this thing works. Keep in mind that as the author, you know the entire story, but the Foundation needs to have discovered what it knows about the SCP through observation and experimentation.

How would someone with no prior knowledge whatsoever of the object, using only experimentation and observation, come to all the conclusions you've outlined above?

Just read SCP-1144, and it seems like the PERFECT example of a "how would the Foundation ever find out about it?" skip. It's a normal-looking scale that gives wacky readings. I fail to see why it would ever come to our attention. I realize that one hasn't been edited in two years, but I'll put a note on that Discuss page that there should be something odd about the item to begin with. It can be as mild as "it works without batteries," just something that would indicate that we should test it.

As for THIS skip, I was thinking that there would be various labeled dials that make the output clear. I've actually got a better idea for it that I'll type up now.

Okay, here's my new idea. This scale is a medieval medical device, a brass chair with four dials attached to it. When someone sits in the scale, the dials measure the Four Humours of old-timey medicine:
blood
phlegm
black bile
yellow bile

Obviously as a system of medicine, the Humours have been discredited. But the four Humours traditionally corresponded to four temperaments, and the machine actually DOES give an accurate description of your personality. For instance, a class-D with anger issues will register high in yellow bile, low in phlegm.

It's still a thing that does a thing, but it can be linked to a cool story about some 13th century medical genius who was kicked out of Oxford for his radical experiments on human subjects.

Oh, and to make it more creepy, what if the dials can be ADJUSTED? What if you can actually change somebody's personality by tweaking those settings?

It's still a thing that does a thing, but it can be linked to a cool story about some 13th century medical genius who was kicked out of Oxford for his radical experiments on human subjects.

I like this. Maybe the chair also stamps out a "prescription" for a "cure" for imbalanced humours (which everyone who sits in the chair suffers from), which include things like a poultice made of raven manure, a leaf in the shape of a heart, a walnut made of two nuts fused together, strange medieval remedies like that, and the Foundation actually tries those cures out. Maybe have the "success" (improved mood) rate be around 30-50%, so there's something up with these cures printed by the chair, maybe, but there's no way to know for sure, and the Foundation gets all frustrated and I think I'm rambling but hey, it's an idea. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

I'm a big fan of the Four Humours/temperaments/characters (teenage mutant ninja turtles, anyone), so this is automatically interesting. I look forward to seeing where you go with this.

There's also the fact that IRL black bile doesn't exist. Which would make it fun if the thing was complemented with a book of anatomical diagrams where an organ producing it figures, and more importantly ,a device or method which can extract it from the body that works (the other three it's easy - blood through drainage, yellow bile - induce vomiting on empty stomach, phlegm - well there are natural things which lead to cleaning cough, eg.)

First off, I think I was too narrowly conceiving of this in terms of personality analysis. I believe the classical understanding of medicine is that ALL illness is caused by an imbalance of the humours, and it's going to take the Foundation five minutes before somebody suggests, "What if we give it someone with cancer?" So we should just make it a very old medical machine that actually works, despite being based on a completely discredited model of the human body.

As for what it actually DOES, I like VAElynx's suggestion that the machine itself actually "operates" on you somehow. We all know medieval medicine was particularly gruesome stuff - seem a shame not to play with that. I imagine there will be lots of redacted information about what the machine does to a person, but there will be four basic functions, each corresponding to the humours. For instance, clearly one of the things the machine can do is bleed you, but it should be in a very specific and redacted way that leaves a lot of the imagination.

And the more extreme the disease, the greater the odds that the treatment will kill the patient. You can put a terminally ill cancer patient in the machine, but there's a 90% chance that the treatment will be fatal. (That way it's not a death-killing "get out of jail free card".)

Okay, now a question for the veterans - do we already have a magical illness-curing machine? The twist here is that it's mysterious and medieval, but it's basically a thing that fixes you.

In all honesty, an inflated death rate for no reason is one of the things that makes me downvote, as it screams of writer's contrivance rather than something inherent in the workings of the machine.

I still feel like it should leave the actual doing to a qualified person, just toss out recipes and prescriptions. And, maybe it only works on a subset of illnesses, which is why the guy was tossed out of Oxford - for example ,while balancing the humours might cure cancer or diabetes, it won't help the least with infectious diseases (which were the main killer and proving stone of medicine thusly back then)
As for the cancer… well, it makes the unhealthy cells die, but then you're stuck with a lump of dead tissue in your body, which if not taken out might not be entirely healthy.

Well, the inflated death rate wouldn't be for no reason. I remember hearing all sort of stories about people getting bled to death by doctors. Those doctors wouldn't have admitted that their cure was wrong, they would have just said that the patient wasn't strong enough to survive the amount of bleeding that they needed to do. Classic "the cure is worse than the disease" situation.

So the way I'm imagining it is that the machine ALWAYS knows how to cure the disease, even a disease that modern medicine considers incurable. But the more serious the disease, the more painful and extreme the treatment. In the case of really serious disease, the patient dies from the trauma of the treatment… which is totally consistent with how medieval medicine often worked.

This would lead to some interesting testing logs. In the case of mental disorders like depression or schizophrenia, it's a miracle cure. Drain some of the black bile and you're all set to go. Maybe the machine can cure the common cold. But if what you have is a cancer, or AIDS, or Ebola, the machine will attempt to drain (or, shudder, ADD TO) your fluids so aggressively that it'll kill you way before it kills the disease. But autopsy reveals that the body is totally disease free.

I'm not against the version where it prescribes things, by the way. That could be fun too. Maybe it actually CAN come up with a complicated herbal remedy for Ebola? But I think with the prescription thing, we need to figure out the "catch." It can't just be an infallible remedy machine. Maybe that's why I gravitated to the version that tries to bleed you - at least it's clear why you should be very hesitant to use the damn thing. You never know when it's going to try and eviscerate you to cure you.

By the way, I probably won't write this up immediately, so if anyone does want to use the idea go ahead. I've actually never written an SCP and I feel like I might not have the time in the near future. But I love this site and I wanted to get involved by commenting on other people's ideas.